2 Guns|East Oak Street, Amite City — the block that played Tres Cruces

East Oak Street runs a few blocks off the Illinois Central tracks and then gives up. Halfway along it sits a low brick bank from the late 1920s — limestone trim, blind arches, a keystone over each window — the sort of building a parish seat puts up while strawberries and lumber are still money. It had been out of the banking business for years. In the summer of 2012 a film crew restored the eighty-year-old shell, hung a new name on it, and turned it into the Tres Cruces Savings & Loan.

Bobby Trench and Stig Stigman case it from a booth across the street. The diner they sit in, Mama Maybelle's, was never a diner at all: the production built a façade around a historic house on the opposite side of Oak Street and dressed it down to chrome, vinyl and a hand-painted sign. The Amite police station stands a short walk off on Central Avenue, close enough to the rails that a freight train is part of the ambience. Everything the first act of 2 Guns needs sits inside two hundred feet of pavement.

The robbery pulls far more money out of that vault than either man was told to expect, and the rest of the film spends ninety minutes unwinding from it. Afterward the bank went back to civilian life; it now houses the Amite Chamber of Commerce. The diner façade came down. The house underneath it is still standing.

Come on a weekday morning and the illusion collapses in a useful way. No marquee, no plaque, nothing to say Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg spent eight weeks of a Louisiana summer here. Just a working chamber of commerce, a police station, a passing train, and one block of 1920s brick in the Downtown Amite Historic District that a studio found more convincing than anything it could have built on a lot. Stand at the corner and you can see the whole opening sequence at once. (Photograph: a storefront on the same downtown Amite blocks, via Wikimedia Commons. Locations per the film's official production notes and WAFB local coverage of the 2012 shoot.)